Patriot or zealot? The word ‘patriot’ can sometimes be difficult to use in civilised company. Ideally it refers to someone who cares deeply about the best interests of their country and quietly goes about making it a better place in which to live. Such people allow... read more

At the time of writing it is the day before the start of Easter. It doesn’t quite have the same ring as the ‘night before Christmas’ because as we know things can get quite sad and miserable in the early stages of this particular religious holiday. Fortunately the mood does pick up towards the end with what is known as the Resurrection. As a child I found this story fascinating with the vision of Jesus, having assured his followers that he was okay, heading skywards through the stratosphere to settle in Heaven. Even as a youngster, however, I did worry that even if he had been able to come back from the dead after crucifixion, that a trip into outer space without a proper spacesuit would surely have….

This is one topic that represents such a paradigm shift in traditional thinking about social change that you just have to forget everything you have been taught so far … relax while we explore the Maharishi Effect.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi introduced Transcendental Meditation to the world in the late 1950s and before long it became known for the obvious mental, physical and spiritual benefits it brought to each individual who practised it. As early as 1960, however, Maharishi had been hinting about its potential to improve the whole of society but the actuality of this did not emerge until 1974 with dramatic findings initially in a dozen USA cities.

Around the Easter period each year it is usual to hear discussion in various religious circles of the Crucifixion in terms of sacrifice and suffering, and in some instances of how necessary it is to suffer in order to to progress spiritually. To many ordinary people this seems like a contradiction in terms as they know that even slight progress toward becoming a better person goes hand in hand with increasing happiness.

Back in the 1960’s, TM founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was finding his way around the Western world and happened to be asked by an interviewer about the suffering of Christ on behalf of humanity. It caused a bit of excitement among conservatives when he replied that Christ did not, and in fact could not have suffered at all – that as an enlightened being he merely would have witnessed what was done to him without any diminishing of his self-experience of unbounded eternal bliss. Maharishi was also quite firm in his assertion that the whole of mankind was not born to suffer, in fact quite the opposite….

Nearly 38 years ago, TM’s founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, oversaw an extraordinary conference at his then Switzerland headquarters which dealt with the perpetually thorny subject of establishing law and order in society. The phrase “law and order” brings to mind images of baton-wielding police, paddy wagons and large grim prison buildings … but Maharishi had something else in mind.

Calling itself the first world assembly on Law, Justice and Rehabilitation, the conference brought together various experts in the legal and medical professions to look at alternatives to the usual harsh and retributive measures brought to bear on criminal behaviour around the world.

The chairman was one Justice V. R. K. Iyer, a member of the Supreme Court in India who observed that many remedial procedures and approaches had been tried but still crime remained a problem everywhere. He said the conference was offering an impressive yet less sensational ‘therapy” to be tried by the world and that was the Transcendental Meditation programme…

Of the many interesting and unexpected things I ever heard said by TM’s founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was an almost offhand comment that in coming from India to the West in the late 1950s he wished he had never used the word “meditation’ to describe the technique he was teaching.

The reason for this little bombshell was that while in India there was still some inherent respect for the concept, he found that Westerners thought of meditation as something vague, difficult, impractical and the sole reserve of a few weirdos in society or monks behind monastery walls.

In a sense that view was fair enough because in the practical-minded West then there did not exist anything in that genre that had been shown to sufficiently improve one’s effectiveness to warrant investing the time to practice it. Maharishi had come however to change that perception as he had a technique that was completely different … it was simple, systematic, easy and it worked! …

Often people will ask TM instructors “what is the difference between Transcendental Meditation and ordinary meditation?”

Good question but what is “ordinary meditation” … these days you could say that there is a smorgasbord of mental techniques available via books, meditation groups and the internet. The concept of ‘meditating’ is now quite acceptable in Western society.

It was not always that way and possibly the biggest change in popular culture perception came when the Beatles learned TM back in the sixties and were invited to India to be part of a special course conducted by the founder of TM, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. …